Re: [PATCH v3 00/19] Adds reftable library code from https://github.com/hanwen/reftable.

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 2, 2021, 09:20 UTC
Message-ID: <875yufpynd.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqtui4k1j5.fsf@gitster.g>

On Tue, Sep 28 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> "Han-Wen Nienhuys via GitGitGadget" <gitgitgadget@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The reftable format is described in Documentation/technical/reftable.txt.
>>
>> This is a fully reentrant implementation of reading and writing the reftable
>> file format, and should be suitable for embedding in libgit2 too. It does
>> not hook the code up to git to function as a ref storage backend yet.
>
> Elsewhere you solicited comments on the "RFC - add LICENSE" step.
>
> As long as the copyright holders of this library are happy with BSD,
> I do not see a problem with your plan in which the project borrows
> this code under the license and then owns it, giving access to
> others under the same license.
>
> If somebody sees problems with it, please raise your hands ;-)

No objection, but as noted in previous discussions about it I think we should have some clarity about what it means for contributors. I.e. that when they're contributing to reftable/ it's BSD license, but for the rest of the codebase it's GPLv2.

I've just submitted a series to address that more generally: https://lore.kernel.org/git/cover-0.5-00000000000-20211002T091212Z-avarab@gmail.com/

I think with that clarification of what these in-tree subdirectory "COPYING" files mean the only thing left is for the "RFC" label to be dropped here.

From what I as not-a-lawyer think I know about how licenses work the concept that we can have BSD licensed content in-tree that can be extracted and legally used by anyone outside of it seems rather dubious.

I.e. if I author a cross-tree where "reftable/" uses some updated API, isn't the result a derived work and now GPLv2 and not "cleanly" BSD licensed? But that's a separate question, and ultimately a worry for any out-of-tree users. So I don't really care. I also believe that we've had that situation before with (I think) libgit2 taking snapshots of our "xdiff", so maybe it's already deemed to be a complete non-issue.

All I'd like is for contributors to git.git not to be confused, which I think with my series above won't be the case.